Member's Off-site Blogs

the battle of the hearts...

Rupert Murdoch is the major mass publisher of climate change denialism. ALL his journals, newspapers and TV outlets sing to the same tune: "Global warming is CRAP". Even when his learned journalists publish some purportedly "balanced" articles on the subject, it is designed to sow doubt in the mind of fair minded people. In his heart he hates anything that smells of anti-coal, anti-oil and anti-gas. He wants to burn the place down with more CO2 emissions. So how can he and HALL got into a relationship?

Here is some of what Jerry Hall wrote in the daily Mail in 2009:

Just like any mother, over the years I have worried about my children's schoolwork, the food they eat, their happiness. But the issues I used to worry about while bringing up Elizabeth, James, Georgia May and Gabriel seem small fry when I consider that their very future is now at stake. Climate change is the biggest threat the world has ever known and it is happening right in front of our eyes. All the experts say governments need to act now if we're to have any chance of saving our children from

It is really just common sense. After all, there is no emergency exit, no back-up planet. If temperatures continue to rise, scientists say we'll be left not just with melted ice caps, but flooded cities and whole species wiped out for ever. I grew up in Texas and as a little girl I kept a raccoon, a pig, horses and even an alligator called Nathan (I still have a scar on my thumb where he bit me when I was 11). As I've grown older, I have begun to get back in touch with nature, and simple things like gardening give me great pleasure. I may have a cupboard full of Manolo Blahniks but these days I'm more likely to be found in a pair of wellingtons and carrying a spade. I keep chickens and I'm starting to grow organic vegetables in my garden - there's nothing like the taste of a carrot you've planted from seed. It may be a long way from the catwalks but I find it healing to get back in touch with the Earth, to remember where our food comes from, and how precious nature is.

Meanwhile, The Australian, the Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Fox News Network, all promote Uncle Rupe's despise of the science of global warming. He will use all the disinformation channels and all the tricks in the book. He is a dangerous man. This is a review by proper scientists of the crap published in the WSJ, by Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser — both on the black list of denialists published by http://www.desmogblog.com/

12 scientists contributed to analyzing the article and estimated its overall scientific credibility to be 'Low' to 'Very Low'[1].

The opinion piece in the WSJ by Matt Ridley & Benny Peiser contains numerous false statements, cherry-picked evidence, and misleading assertions about climate science. It attempts to surround the hard facts about climate change with clouds of uncertainty, even though these facts are agreed to by the scientific academies of every major country in the world and the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists.

Facts and/or studies are cherry picked or placed out of context to support the main claim that global warming is not as bad as we feared. For example the assertion that 1.5C of warming would be “beneficial” is one that very few scientists or economists agree with, and is contradicted by the overwhelming weight of evidence in the IPCC’s reports showing that the adverse impacts from climate change will far outweigh the benefits from carbon-dioxide induced greening and other heat-related effects.

In the logo above, one should already note the deceit. The graph is limited to the years from 2000 onwards (21st century). This is designed to highlight the "plateau" of temperature which was promoted by denialists as the end of warming (which never happened in their mind despite referencing to 1989 as the warmest year on record).

Should one does a real comparison, 2014 was the warmest year on record then and 2015 IS NOW THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD NOW by a whopping 0.15 Degree C on the new average (about ten times the annual increase measured since the 1950s). The GWPF, presently directed by Benny Peiser and created by Nigel Lawson and promoted by Lord Monckton is a deceitful outfit.

Patrick Moore background informationPatrick Moore, a paid spokesman for the nuclear industry, the logging industry, and genetic engineering industry, frequently cites a long-ago affiliation with Greenpeace to gain legitimacy in the media. Media outlets often either state or imply that Mr. Moore still represents Greenpeace, or fail to mention that he is a paid lobbyist and not an independent source. This page contains information about how to accurately describe Mr. Moore and to judge his credibility.

Patrick Moore is a Paid Spokesperson for the Nuclear Industry

In April 2006, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the principal lobby for the nuclear industry, launched the Clean And Safe Energy Coalition and installed former Bush Administration EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Mr. Moore as its co-chairs. The Clean and Safe Energy Coalition was part of a public relations project spearheaded by the public relations giant Hill & Knowlton as part of its estimated $8 million contract with the nuclear industry.(1)

Patrick Moore Does Not Represent Greenpeace

For more than 20 years, Mr. Moore has been a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries, including the timber, mining, chemical and the aquaculture industries. Most of these industries hired Mr. Moore only after becoming the focus of a Greenpeace campaign to improve their environmental performance. Mr. Moore has now worked for polluters for far longer than he ever worked for Greenpeace. Greenpeace opposes the use of nuclear energy because it is a dangerous and expensive distraction from real solutions to climate change.

Patrick Moore Did Not Found Greenpeace

Patrick Moore frequently portrays himself as a founder or co-founder of Greenpeace, and many news outlets have repeated this characterization. Although Mr. Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace. Phil Cotes, Irving Stowe, and Jim Bohlen founded Greenpeace in 1970. Patrick Moore applied for a berth on the Phyllis Cormack in March, 1971 after the organization had already been in existence for a year. A copy of his application letter and Greenpeace's response are available here (PDF).

Patrick Moore Has Provided Inaccurate Information on Nuclear Power

In 2004, Mr. Moore published an article in the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) journal entitled "Nuclear Re-think." According to Mr. Moore, "Three Mile Island was a success story. The concrete containment structure did as it was designed to do: it prevented radiation from escaping into the environment."(2)

Contrary to Mr. Moore's claim, the damaged reactor spewed radiation into the environment for days. It appears that Mr. Moore didn't even bother to check his facts. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's fact sheet on Three Mile Island (TMI) acknowledges that the meltdown resulted in "a significant release of radiation…"(3)

The global warming denialists do not hesitate in calling upon "reports" by serious scientists to confirm their denialist "views". But they do it in a way which is misleading, misquoting or simply truncating bits of the report to suit their agenda. Here is a simple example of devious deceit from the GWPF:

With regard specifically to the report we recently published by Indur Goklany called Carbon Dioxide: The Good News, detailed comments were received by reviewers inside and outside the AAC. The author was asked to respond to them, which he did. Any allegation to the contrary is false. The validity of the research in the Goklany report is self-evident. As Professor Freeman Dyson said in the foreword, “To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage.” Professor Colin Prentice of the Grantham Institute concurred, saying “much of it is quite correct and moreover, well-established in the scientific literature…the various benefits of rising CO2 are actually well established in the scientific literature, even if sometime ignored. They are indeed ‘good news’. ”

“Carbon Dioxide: The Good News” – This is the title of a recent Global Warming Policy Foundation report (Goklany, 2015) that focuses on the benefits of CO2 for people. In a hard-hitting foreword, eminent physicist Freeman Dyson claims that the entire scientific and policy establishment has been suffering from a form of “tribal group-think” that involves systematically ignoring the “obvious” facts about CO2.

The reason I find this report dismaying is not that it misrepresents the science. In fact, much of it is quite correct and moreover, well-established in the scientific literature. But given the ever-increasing politicisation of climate science, its author evidently found it appropriate to set up a straw man hypothesis, according to which CO2 is said to be “evil and dangerous” (by whom?), and to write the report in a polemical way that tends to draw the reader to a conclusion that because this straw man can easily be burnt down, the current international interest in emissions reduction is entirely misguided. He accuses the IPCC (Working Group 2) of putting a particular, negative gloss on the impacts of climate change on crop yields, for example; but then he puts his own very particular gloss on several topics, including the celebrated warming “hiatus”, the subject of an extensive recent literature that he largely ignores, in favour of the popular pastime of rubbishing climate models.

Want to lose £2,000? Then make a bet with a climate change expert that the world isn’t warming.

That’s what two members of Lord Lawson’s climate change science denying Global Warming Policy Foundation(GWPF) did when they bet Chris Hope, a Cambridge University researcher, that 2015 wouldn’t be the hottest year ever recorded.

“You win some, you lose some,” Benny Peiser, director of the GWPF, told Reuters, adding that the pace of warming “is not something that people… need to be greatly concerned about”.

Five years ago British engineer Alan Rudge and Australian geologist Ian Plimer – both members of the GWPFacademic advisory council – bet Hope £1,000 each that the Earth would be cooling by now, not warming.

Hope bet that average global temperatures in 2015 would be no more than 0.1°C cooler than in 2008.

When compared with the pre-industrial period, the 2015 average global temperature was around 1°C above the long-term average from 1850 to 1900 the Met Office said.

Temperature data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also showed that 2015 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880.

Uncharted Territory

Experts agree the record-breaking 2015 temperature was the result of the long-term warming trend caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels combined with a strong El Niño year.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said: “2015 was remarkable even in the context of the ongoing El Niño. Last year’s temperatures had an assist from El Niño, but it is the cumulative effect of the long-term trend that has resulted in the record warming that we are seeing.”

Professor Phil Jones, from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, said: “While there is a strong El Niño-elevated global temperature this year, it is clear that human influence is driving our climate into uncharted territory.”

One needs to keep an eye on the bastards... They try to appear up-to-date without any remark that could rock their flimsy denialist boat. Anyway the GWPF has updated its logo.

This is the updated version (portion thereof):

This still does not account for the rise in temperature during the 20th century. Note that most of the years in the 21st century were warmer than the years of the 20th century. This is the previous logo:

Rupert Murdoch's Twenty-First Century Fox is set to win unconditional EU antitrust approval for its £11.7bn (€13.7bn) takeover of European pay-TV group Sky, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday.

Fox already owns 39pc of Sky. Murdoch and his family have long coveted full control of Sky, despite the damaging failure of a previous attempt in 2011 when their British newspaper business became embroiled in a phone-hacking scandal.

The European Commission, which is scheduled to decide on the deal on Friday, declined to comment.